Hey Tim,
since you've been the one doing all the technical work back then, it would be cool if you told me what has to be done in order to put a song together and, if necessary, what programs are needed to do that. I suppose, since I'm the one iniciating this whole project again, I'll also be the one who has to do all of this stuff - or at least most of it. I'm not too familiar with doing such things however so your advice would be really appreciated here (or your help if you can spare some freetime 
)
Hey Ducky123,
I'd personally recommend doing the project in this order:
1) Create or determine the background music trackYou basically have two choices here and it all comes down to what you want out of the song:
- Simply use the song from the movie. If you do this, remember that you won't be able to completely remove the original vocals so we'll basically end up singing on top of them.
- Write your own background music track from scratch. I often took this approach but it is significantly more time-consuming. This approach can involve either reproducing the original music by ear as accurately as possible or by writing a custom arrangement of the song. This can be done using completely free software (MuseScore is a free, modern MIDI sequencer with a sheet music view) if you're willing to write a MIDI file and export it to mp3, or you can get as professional as you want and produce something that sounds like a complete piece.
If you want more information on this approach, let me know, otherwise I'll shut up.
2) Send the background music track to all of your singers.It's vital that everyone sings along to the same background music track for two reasons:
- Tuning. Some versions of some songs, even from official sources, may be in a different key (the Songs from the LBT CD and the songs on the DVD from LBT 2-4 are notorious for this problem).
- Synchronization. You're going to want to make sure that everyone is singing a song that's the same tempo (speed) as the one you'll be using to put them all together. If they're not exactly the same tempo, you'll have a very bad time.
3) When you get the singers to record, make sure they ONLY record the vocals! You don't want any background music in the vocal recordingsThis one is straightforward but following it gives you much better results in the end. Otherwise you'll end up with the final song sounding like a mushy mess and you'll have no way to remove the additional instances of the background music. Get your singers to wear headphones while recording. They simply press PLAY on the background music, hit RECORD on their mic, sing along with the music and BAM! You have a recording that's in sync and on-key without any background music.
Make sure that everyone sends you good-quality audio of their recordings. 96 kbps MP3 won't cut it. Get AT LEAST 192 kbps MP3. 320 kbps, or better, uncompressed .wav, is ideally what you want. Mono is fine since I doubt most people have a stereo mic setup.
4) Mixing the vocals together is more of an art than a scienceSupposedly Audacity is multi-track mixing software as well as recording software. I'd suggest looking into it. If you don't already have a favorite music production program, start there and Google around for "free audio mixing software" or something along those lines. There has to be something out there.
I personally used FL Studio (for most songs) and Sonar (for Things Change). Beyond the Mysterious Beyond, that I posted up a few posts, was written and mixed in FL Studio. FL Studio has come a LONG way and is a very good tool for everything related to this project as a whole, including writing the background music...but it's also $200 so it may not be an option. There is a free version but you can't load save files in the free version.
I don't really know what's out there for free multi-track mixing software. You'll have to browse around. If you want to get all pro and fancy, I'd recommend FL Studio, Sonar, Pro Tools or Cubase.
As for the mixing itself, subtle use of effects can vastly improve the results. Your best friends will be:
Reverb - An effect that places the source audio into a virtual space so it doesn't just sound like a recording of someone on a webcam mic.
Compression - An effect that controls the dynamics (volumes) of the track over time and lets you control pops and quiet parts, while helping you emphasize accents and attacks. Basically it makes loud parts quieter and quiet parts louder. This is fantastic when not dealing with professional singers because things like distance from the mic and voice control just aren't consistent.
Stereo Separation - An effect, when applied after the source vocal and a reverb effect, really livens up a sound and kills the "mono" sound that comes from just using a mono recording on its own.
Typically you'd probably want to chain the effects in this order:
Source vocal audio -> Compression -> Reverb -> Stereo Separation -> Equalizer if you want to use it.
Go ahead and play around though! My notes on effects are simply rough guidelines, not rules.
It's important to note that these (and other) effects aren't simply "plug and play"; they have a large number of properties and settings that can be changed in order to get exactly the result you want. Reverb and stereo separation are fairly intuitive on their own, whereas compression really has a bit of a learning curve.
Oh, a tip? Don't go toooo crazy with the reverb. I know it's tempting because at first more will sound "better". Listen to that little voice in your head that's telling you "hmm, this might be too much..." because it probably is.
Outside of effects, remember to use volume envelopes (changing volumes-per-recording over time). This will let you fade tracks in and out, as well as control the relative levels of each singer at any given time. If your mixing software doesn't have this, try to find one that does. Without this feature, you'll have an extremely hard time.
Basically, you need some way to change the volume of a vocalist throughout the song, to help you keep everything nice and balanced, as well as give you a way to fade singers in and out, allowing solos, specific combinations of singers, etc.
The biggest challenge I always had when doing these, and part of why I stopped doing them honestly, was because of the massive discrepancy between the sound of each vocalist. I don't mean the voices themselves but the recording styles:
Some singers had the mics close to their mouths; some had them further away. Many of them had some level of background noise that needed to be filtered out using noise reduction effects. Everyone has a different kind of microphone. Some mics, like headset mics, pick up a voice very closely and intimately. Others, like webcam mics, pick up the space that the voice is in and add distance to the vocalist's voice. Trying to mix the two is basically impossible. You just have to do what you can.
Stuff like that REALLY starts to become noticeable when you're doing the mixing.
My recommendation? If you can, try to get everyone to use their headset mics if they have them. They tend to work MUCH better than webcam mics or mics that pick up an entire space, rather than JUST a person's voice. If someone has an actual vocal mic, even better.
Understand that, because nobody is really using professional-quality equipment in a proper recording environment, you will be limited on how good your mixing can be. Just do your best.
